D.C-area buildings constructed to meet green standards face certification lag - Houston Business Journal:

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They counted the roughly 400 feet to the neares tMetro stop. They caught a glimpse of the greem roof. They gazed at the computerize d windowshades that, every 10 minutes or so, calculate the angls of the sun and elevatiom of the floor to automatically adjusft the blinds, preventing excess heat from entering the From the building’s water-saving bathroom fixturesa to its environmentally advanced chillers, owner Louis Dreyfuw Property Group claimed its latest offering, Lafayette Towet at 801 17th St.
NW, to be the greenes t office building in the But onefeature — perhaps the most importanr to both host and visitors that day — was nowherer in sight despite the builder’s best efforts: a certificatiohn plaque that proved those claims. Instead, Louid Dreyfus, which was sprinting to make Lafayette Towerthe city’e first Platinum-certified green office building and was repeatedly told it already had the pointx to do so, suffered considerable delays in receiving its finalk Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Like many other developers, tenants and property owners around the region, the companhy fell victim to one of the biggesg stumbling blocks that the U.S.
Greemn Building Council itselffaces — a backloh of hundreds of LEED certification requests that has stretched processing periods from what shoulcd be five weeks to closer to five Buildings are designed to be LEED but don’tt get official certification until the green aspects are verified and pointe are awarded. Developers say the lag time hampers theirr ability to promote their buildings to prospectivd tenants in an already whiplashed realestated market. But they agree that one of the USGBC’sa biggest failings to date can be attributeed toone thing: its unanticipatexd level of success.
LEED certification, which began as a mark of an environmentall minded, niche-inhabiting few, rapidly turned into a mainstream, in some casew legally mandated, building practice, all at a time when the councip was undergoing itsdeepest transformations. Today, a recharged USGBx has made systemic changes it says will help eliminats the backlog of active projects as much as 750 projectsa globally and 50 in the District alone by the endof June.
“I’vw learned you have just got to be saidSean Cahill, vice president of development for Louis Dreyfus, whic h finally got its LEED certification barely a week afte the brokers’ tour, indeed making Lafayette the first Platinum officd building in D.C. The officiap designation came more than a year aftetthe company’s first application was submitteed — but in time for its next brokee open house. In the meantime, another developer, The Towedr Cos., snagged the first official Platinum new-construction designation for the also after along wait. “j don’t think they’re slow out of malice.
I don’g think they’re slow because they don’tf know what they’re doing,” Cahill said. “I thinok they are still trying to get their feet beneath them for the Few people could have predicted that demanr when LEED was fathered more than adecadwe ago. Now that the USGBdC is working on its ninth certification track and boasts78 20,000 members and 35,000 projects, still fewet people outright blame the organization for the problem. The certification delays are the resultof “growing pains,” said Shannon Sentman, a LEED-accredited lawyer in D.C. for Holland & Knight LLP.
“Aa far as problems go for organizations, it’s a good one to But it is tough on green buildinh aspirants given that LEED has a near monopoly in the regiobn when it comes to increasinglyfashionable eco-friendly designn standards. So much so that most countiesw and cities in the region have adopted LEED as their green building standarcdof choice, relegating other guidelines such as Green Globes and EarthCraft to stepsisterf status.
Montgomery County and the District went so far as to incorporatre LEED into new green building requirements for both municipa l and commercialbuildings — laws that turned an optionakl system for the elite into a mandate for all, further lengtheningy the lines for LEED certification. Althougn every LEED applicationgenerates revenue, the organization couldn’tt keep up. The USGBC did not help matteras with its own simultaneous The council shifted its separat locations into a new downtown headquartersz to handle itsdramatic growth, even as it severedd its certification arm into a separate entity, the Greeh Building Certification Institute, in the last All the while, the USGBC was drafting and debutingf a radically different 2009 version of its LEED systemk for building certifications and individual accreditations.
Both revisions cause d a glut of applications before the updates version will take effectJune 26. “Therse just weren’t enough resources to devote to everything, not as much as you’ds like,” said Bruce DeMaine, vice president of certificatiob for thecertifying institute. “Yoh start adding all of these things to our primary and you can see where it becomes stressfu foran organization.” Instead, now the institut e will oversee the building certification process with the help of 10 accreditedc affiliates around the world.
With that change, the councip employees who touched every LEED design and construction applicatio will turn the job over to 150 trained reviewerz who will manage the process from first draft to finalo award for anexpected 3,000p certifications this year. The affiliates foresee rampinh up by an additional 50 to 75 peopl enext year, when projections call for up to 3,6009 new certification requests. The institut will then transitionfrom go-between messenged to quality-control cop, with a planned 15 employeeds only surveying a random sampld of applications after the fact to make sure the new methodf still lives up to original standards.
“We’rwe going to be eliminating the back and forth between three entities downto two,” DeMaine “That should cut down on any communication lag After calculating its new capacity, the certification institute expects the backlog to be wiped clean by June 26, barelh a month away — a timeline more often describedd by several outsiders as ambitiouws rather than realistic. “They’ve set themselves up this year with a prettyuaggressive deadline,” said Kara Strong, senior projecg manager for Sustainable Design Consulting. “The good news is they are definiteluy aware ofthe problem. They are doinvg their best to fix it.
” Until then, developerzs and architects have to managetheifr clients’ expectations. The less that buildiny owners expect to get the LEED seal by a certain the less frustrated they are at theinevitablse delays. “A lot of clients do want to have the LEED plaquesat [the building’s] dedication,” said Greg a principal at the architectural firm SmithGroup. “I generall tell them why that may not bea